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Gitmo As Systemic Failure

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Gitmo As Systemic Failure

by

Abby Zimet

With the appalling news that Obama's State Department is reassigning Daniel Fried, the envoy supposedly working to close Guantánamo, not replacing him and closing his office - in other words, abandoning all pretext that Gitmo will close any time soon, if ever - critics are blasting what Glenn Greenwald calls "vintage Obama: a pretty symbolic gesture designed to enable Democrats to feel good while retaining the core powers that constituted the injustice in the first place." More including Esquire's Charles Pierce, who nails it.

Obama's cowardice and Congress' obstinance, writes Pierce, "are only part of a systemic failure of faith in the institutions that we feel safe in bragging about to the world, but not in allowing them to work the way they're supposed to work here. The institutions failed because the politicians failed, and the politicians failed because we let them. The prison is still open because, fundamentally, and in the only way open to us, we as a nation expressed a desire that it stay open. Period."

Further

In the face of increasingly catastrophic climate news - rising sea levels, wildfires, drought - a team of Russian photographers with the non-profit AirPano have taken to the air in helicopters, airplanes, dirigibles and hot air balloons to offer virtual and panoramic tours of the planet's most stunning locations, urban to wilderness, to remind us what's at stake. Take note.